Lemurian Seed Crystals are a special variety of clear quartz that carry the the record of the Lemurian Grid, held in frequency, but able to access through the crystal, if your matrix and that of the crystal align.Uses: Lemurian Seed allegedly bring a connection with the Divine Feminine and a unification of the soul. Named for the ancient fabled civilization of Lemuria, they open access to knowledge and ancient wisdom from the collective consciousness.

"Black opal" is a term used for opal that has a dark body color, often black or dark gray. The term is also used for opal that has a dark blue or dark green body color. The dark body color often makes the fire of black opal more obvious.

This contrast of fire color to body color makes black opals very desirable and sold for high prices.

This specimen is a solid black opal with a strong blue face-up color play. It was mined at Lightning Ridge, Australia, the "Black Opal Capital of the World".

for anyone who is interested..here's the current thinking on them...believe it or don't

As a geologist and lapidary I have always got amusement from what we call the "healy feely" crowd.

Those are the ones that run their hands through a box of tumbles stones and can "feel" the crystal energy..

Well first of all the tumbled stones are not crystal, just rocks and any energy would be scattered. It can be argued that a pure crystal can channel energy (like the ruby crystals (man made) that focus laser light and the quartz crystals used in computer timers

But most of the names of stuff like Lemurian Seed Crystals is New Age mumbo jumbo created for one purpose... to see you an ordinary quartz crystal at 10 times the value by giving it a fancy label

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Teresa Nielsen HaydenRe: Lemurian Crystals April 04, 2011 12:51PM Registered: 4 years agoPosts: 3Renee, there are people in this world who want to believe that magic exists. There are other people who may or may not believe in magic, but who know that they can make money selling stuff that's supposedly magic -- call it their product line -- to people who want to believe in it.

However, their customers inevitably lose faith in the existing product line, because after a while they notice that it isn't actually magic. This means they need a constant trickle of new products, and new storylines to tell about them. These storylines are essential because they provide vague but nifty-sounding explanations for why Arkansas quartz crystals, little pots of scented oil, bags of tumble-polished stones, sterling-silver angel jewelry, bundles of dried sage, and all the other bits of merchandise are magic. Lemurian storylines go in and out of fashion. Right now they're on the upswing. As usual, they're stories about ancient half-secret knowledge that's tremendously powerful but has somehow been forgotten.

The original Lemuria was made up by a 19th C. naturalist who wanted to explain why there were similar lemur species in Madagascar and India. He figured those areas used to be connected by a now-vanished continent. A number of scientists around that time hypothesized the existence of lost continents. These notions were completely superseded when other scientists figured out continental drift and plate tectonics. In the meantime, though, storytellers had gotten hold of the "lost continents" idea, and have been kicking it around ever since.

In the current version, I believe the ancient wise guys of Lemuria were some kind of ascended UFO aliens who recorded their wisdom in quartz crystals, along with scads of healing energy. Believers use various techniques to extract this energy and wisdom. For further insights, I suggest searching Mindat.org for commentary on "azeztulite", a stone which New Age promoters announced was chock-full of Lemurian Energy.

Here is one reference to them that I noticed recently when browsing around to see what other on-line mineral auctions exist apart from e-Bay & Mindat. It is an auction item that attempts to explain the derivation of the term; "Lemurian quartz specimen" sold by Bonhams .

Notwithstanding the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo attached to the name, there is a description referring to the combination of horizontal striations on the prism faces which can give the impression of a ladder, together with the cluster of small crystals around the lower part of the largest one, which can give the impression of a horde of people trying to climb the ladder. So I suppose that from the gemmological/aesthetic point of view, one could view it as a fanciful bit of "Natural Sculpture".

Nice crystals, but I had to do a double-take when I saw the price paid for the specimen! I might have paid a max of about 5% of that. Some of the prices paid for for other pretty ordinary specimens at that auction are also quite amazing. Presumably not paid by scientific mineral collectors but by top end aesthetic collectors to whom money is no object, speculative investors, or metapysical believers with more money than sense!

Pete N.

Now it has always been my problem to be HONEST when selling gem and minerals... but in today's world, just like in the UFO field, the CHARLATANS RULE and are making a killing selling Fancy named rocks to the New Age crowd...

NASA's next mission to Mars involves vehicles that will return rocks to Earth.I'm guessing they would fetch a pretty hefty price on the open market.

NASA seems to be against selling the material to fund themselves I never understood that UNLESS those moon rocks that they so jealously want to keep under wraps didn't actually come from the moon and thus selling them they would soon be outed (In fact several that were handed out and recovered turned out to be fake)

But yeah At least until mars flights are regular tourist things those opals would fetch a huge profit Same with a few pounds of those Martian Blueberries

In 1987 Ed Swoboda and I (Rock Currier) and Osorio Neto (a Brazilinan gem dealer living in Belo Horizonte, Brazil ran a little hand worked mine near the little town of Joaquim Felício for quartz crystals. It produced two fabulous specimens of Japan law twined quartz and lot of these kinds of crystals. I brought them back to the Unites States to sell, and to my surprise my customers called them lemurian crystals.I have seen crystals from other Brazilian localities also called lemurian and think of them as being prismatic tapered crystals.

IntroductionThese pages display false color representations of rocks, soils, and other surface features photographed by the Pancam instruments on the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity (Bell et al., 2004a,b). Images from Spirit are shown in the left column, and images from Opportunity are shown in the right column. Next to each image is some information about the Sol when the image was acquired on (a sol is a Mars day, which is 24 hours and 39 minutes long), the Pancam sequence number, the Local True Solar Time (LTST) when the image was acquired (assuming 24 "hours" per sol), the Earth date corresponding to that sol and LTST, and the 3 filters used to create the image. You can click on the JPG or TIFF links to download full-resolution versions of each image.

It is important to remember that these images are not intended to represent what you would see if you were standing on the surface of Mars. They are False Color views created to emphasize differences in visual color, and to produce color images when there is not enough information available to calculate the true color of a scene.

The BasicsThe two Panoramic Cameras (called Pancams) on each of the Mars Exploration Rovers work somewhat like a pair of human eyes. Each camera's light sensitive "cells" are called pixels, and they are part of a light detecting "eye" called a Charge Coupled Device, or CCD. However, unlike the human eye, the Pancams only measure one single wavelength or color at a time. In front of each camera is a filter wheel with eight different filters (seven colors plus one filter for looking at the Sun), each of which allows only certain wavelengths to hit the CCD. Five of the filters in the left Pancam eye of each rover are filters which span the colors that we can see, from blue to green to red. The other filters that Pancam uses can detect colors of light that we cannot see, called "ultraviolet" and "infrared." To create these false color pictures of Mars, we use three pictures taken of the same scene from the Pancam's left eye. We use computer software to combine the separate pictures into one where differences in color are stretched and highlighted.

The purpose of these images, unlike the true color images we produce is to enhance subtle differences in color. These differences are sometimes so small that a person looking at them would not be able to see them at all - something you can see by comparing a true color image with its corresponding false color version. Images like these allow scientists to quickly asses even subtle color differences, and to choose the most interesting regions for possible study with the rover arm instruments. Subtle color changes may indicate changes in the materials making up rocks and soils, or how these materials are concentrated or deposited.

The SpecificsThe first step in creating false color images is to select which filters are used. When more than 3 left eye filters are available, the filters are chosen such that they span as much of the Pancam CCD's wavelength response as possible. For this reason, the most common filter combination is L2, L5 and L7, which correspond to wavelengths of 753, 535, and 432 nm, respectively. When these are not available, the filter with the shortest wavelength available is used for the blue channel, the longest available wavelength is used for the red channel, and the median wavelength is used for the green value. We use images calibrated using the absolute radiometric calibration of the cameras - radiance calibrated images produced by the calibration pipline as described in Bell et al. (2003, 2006). For each filter image, a maximum and minimum pixel value is selected by adding and subtracting 3 times the pixel values standard deviation from the image's pixel median value. If these values fall outside the bounds of values in the image, then the image actual maximum or minimum value is used. Using these minima and maxima as value bounds, each image is scaled independently between values of 0 and 255. Then the three scaled images are used as the red, green, and blue channels of a color image."

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So... even if all we had was the old white balance filter, it is certainly preferable to viewing brownscale images.

Lighting conditions suck on Mars, so anything we can do to correct these deficiencies is a welcome addition.

You will notice in the beginning of each rover series they begin by posting both the raw version and the corrected version.

But in short order they stopped posting the raw images because nobody was interested in them.

Even though they are technically called 'false color' they are certainly preferable to the brownscale images.

Without the color corrected images we would not even be able to see the blue in the Opal.